John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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All we had was a dream. Within the limits of the painfully short resources we had on hand, we wanted to publish — even if we never got past the first one — a magazine that would interest us. Not advertisers, not distributors, not the "average" reader, not the pseudo-intellectuals. Us. And we wanted a periodical that would [1] help other little people just like us live richer, fuller, freer, more self-directed lives and [2] ease us all into more actively putting the interests of the planet over and above any personal interests.

PLOWBOY: That sounds easy when you say it now. But five years ago, when you took your stand, you were really dreaming an impossible dream. You didn't have the resources to pull off that sort of thing! What was it you and Jane began with ... $1,500?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Fifteen hundred dollars and a kitchen table to work on ... when we weren't using it to eat off of!

Yes, I know. It was impossible. At least that's what the big distributors told us when we took that first, rather pathetic, issue of Mother Earth News to New York and showed it to them.

"Kids," they said, "you've got a great idea. But you should cut the price. Fill the book with any ads you can get. Forget about printing what you want. Get some more sensational articles. And run off 200,000 to 300,000 copies of an issue instead of the 10,000 you're running now. Sure, you'll have a lot of returns ... but that's the way the magazine business operates."

PLOWBOY: Those guys were telling you to do exactly the things that killed Look and Life and a bunch of other mass-market periodicals!

SHUTTLEWORTH: That's right. And they thought we were crazy when we said that printing and distributing more copies of an issue than we could sell would waste too many trees. Or that we didn't care to sell any magazines at all if we had to do it with nudes and four-letter words. Or that we thought it was more honest to live mainly off subscription and single copy — rather than ad — revenue. And so on.

PLOWBOY: To put it another way, then, you refused to have Mother Earth News positioned. If the magazine wouldn't sell when its honest identity was honestly presented, you didn't want to sell it.

SHUTTLEWORTH: That's about it. That was our marketing philosophy five years ago when we started and it's still our marketing philosophy now.

PLOWBOY: And that's all there is to it?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Oh, of course not! That's just the basic, bedrock rule that we try never, knowingly, to violate. There's a great deal more to the way we market Mother Earth News than that.

From the very beginning, for instance, we felt that we were in a race with time. That the planet was being raped and plundered so rapidly that we couldn't afford to take the easy way out and offer Mother Earth News only to the relatively few concerned people who — at any one time — are ready for her "save the earth by changing the way you live" message.

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